One important biographical fact (or rumour) so far omitted from this story is that, as a Cambridge undergraduate, Marvell had a personal encounter with Roman Catholicism. Thomas Cooke related in his 1776 edition that soon after Marvell's arrival at Trinity College:

And Cooke's anecdote was confirmed by the later discovery of a letter from the vicar of Welton to Marvell's father, reporting on a similar experience in his own family and asking for advice as to how to handle it. (Kelliher, p. 25)

This youthful truancy, which is how Andrew Senior evidently saw it, would not be of much interest were it not for the fact that, of the eight devotional poems that introduced Marvell's Miscellaneous Poems to the Restoration reader in 1681, three (or four, if one counts both the English and Latin versions of ‘On a Drop of Dew’) have Roman Catholic antecedents. Yet they share the privileged space of the volume's opening pages with ‘Bermudas’, whose imagined context is the flight of puritan settlers to the New World; and introducing all the devotional poems is ‘A Dialogue between the Resolved Soul, and Created Pleasure’, whose opening lines not only celebrate a plain style of religious experience, but might also be considered a symbolic retelling of Marvell's juvenile truancy: of Jesuit seduction countered by paternal, puritan restraint.